HOW WE CREATED COLUMBO – AND HOW HE NEARLY
KILLED US
By Richard Levinson and William Link(from their book "Stay Tuned: An Inside
Look at the Making of Prime Time Television," excerpted in American
Film magazine, March, 1981)

Each year in February or March, Manhattan is the
setting for a rite of spring undreamed of by Stravinsky. Executives
and independent suppliers descend upon the city for what is known as
"selling season." Armed with pilot scripts and a backlog of
"concepts," the invading hoard sequesters itself in various hotel
suites and begins to bombard the networks with high-powered
salesmanship. The object of all of this is to get new series on the
schedule, or keep existing series on the air.

In
recent years the nature of the selling season has changed, but in
March of 1971, when Sid Sheinberg and his associates from Universal
deployed themselves at the Sherry Netherland Hotel, they had only a
few weeks to hawk their wares and convince the three networks that
theirs was the better mousetrap. Sheinberg had, among his other
offerings, one surefire package: a ninety-minute series, created for
a Sunday-night time period, called "The NBC Mystery Movie." It would
include three rotating shows: "McCloud," which had already aired the
previous season as part of a now-defunct series; "McMillan and
Wife," to star Rock Hudson in his television debut; and "Columbo,"
with Peter Falk as a police lieutenant.

What happens in New York chain-reacts -- or self-destructs -- in Los
Angeles. When Sheinberg returned with his bag of sales, it became
instantly necessary to staff all of the new shows, find scripts, and
race into production to meet September air dates. Producers
immediately competed with one another for writers, cameramen and
crews. A period of tumultuous activity ensued, not only at Universal
but at studios all over town.

The expected call came one morning in April, and we met with
Sheinberg. He asked us if we would produce "Columbo". He told us the
ground rules -- Peter FaIk was due to begin rehearsals for Neil
Simon's new comedy, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, on September 12.
Could we complete six ninety-minute "Columbo" films by then?

For reasons that still mystify us, we accepted the assignment.
Within a few days we acquired an energetic and knowledgeable
associate producer, Bob O'Neill, and a young writer named Steven
Bochco was recommended for story editor. We moved to a larger suite
of offices, shut the door, and began work on a ninety-minute script.
Half a dozen months and several lifetimes later, not six but seven
"Columbo" films were finished and ready for the verdict of the
viewing public.

There was, as always, no time for reflection; we literally began
making conceptual decisions on the walk from Sheinberg's office to
our own. Fortunately, we had the first "Columbo" pilot,
"Prescription: Murder," as a prototype. The first order of business
for many series is to make radical changes as soon as the pilot is
sold. But we had an instinctive feeling that there was strength in
the "Prescription: Murder" format, and we decided not to vary it.
Each "Columbo" would make use of the so-called inverted mystery
form, a method of storytelling invented by an English writer named
R. Austin Freeman in the early part of the century.

According to Ellery Queen in his study of detective fiction, Queen's
Quorum, Freeman posed himself the following question: "Would it be
possible to write a detective story in which, from the outset, the
reader was taken entirely into the author's confidence, was made an
actual witness of the crime and furnished with every fact that could
possibly be used in its detection?" Freeman answered his own
question by employing the device in his book The Singing Bone, and
based on our experience with the two "Columbo" pilots, we had a
hunch that it would work on television. We had no idea that it would
become an eventual trap for us and for all of the other writers who
would bang their heads against the wall of the inviolate "Columbo"
format.

We made other decisions those first weeks, the most basic of which
was that the series would not be what is known as a "cop show." We
had no intention of dealing with the realities of actual police
procedures. Instead, we wanted to pay our respects to the classic
mystery fiction of our youth, the works of the Carrs, the Queens,
and the Christies. We knew that no police officer on earth would be
permitted to dress as shabbily as Columbo, or drive a car as
desperately in need of burial, but in the interest of flavorful
characterization, we deliberately chose not to be realistic. Our
show would be a fantasy, and as such it would avoid the harsher
aspects of a true policeman's life: the drug busts, the street
murders, the prostitutes, and the back-alley shootouts.

We would create a mythical Los Angeles and populate it with affluent
men and women living in the stately homes of the British mystery
novel; our stories would be much closer in spirit to Dorothy L.
Sayers than to Joseph Wambaugh. Besides, our rumpled cop would be
much more amusing if he were always out of his element, playing his
games of cat and mouse in the mansions and watering holes of the
rich. We even decided never to show him at police headquarters or at
home; it seemed to us much more effective if he drifted into our
stories from limbo.

When the series went on the air, many critics found it an
ever-so-slightly subversive attack on the American class system in
which a proletarian hero triumphed over the effete and moneyed
members of the Establishment. But the reason for this was dramatic
rather than political. Given the persona of Falk as an actor, it
would have been foolish to play him against a similar type, a Jack
Klugman, for example, or a Martin Balsam. Much more fun could be had
if he were confronted by someone like Noel Coward.

Our final decision was to keep the series nonviolent. There would be
a murder, of course, but it would be sanitized and barely seen.
Columbo would never carry a gun. He would never be involved in a
shooting or a car chase (he'd be lucky, in fact, if his car even
started when he turned the key), nor would he ever have a fight. The
show would be the American equivalent of the English drawing room
murder mystery, dependent almost entirely on dialogue and ingenuity
to keep it afloat.

Because of these elements -- and constraints -- "Columbo" was a
difficult show to write for. The format was reasonably new, and many
of the writers we approached either didn't understand it or else
understood all too well and felt it wasn't worth the effort. We
arranged a screening of the second "Columbo" pilot, "Ransom for a
Dead Man," for sixty-odd free-lance writers. Such screenings are
common; they are a way of introducing writers to a new show. In
theory they will whet the appetites of those assembled, who will
then hurry home, explode with ideas, and contact the producer with
requests for meetings. In our case, only two out of the sixty
expressed any interest. One of these was Jackson Gillis, a veteran
of the long-running "Perry Mason" series and an expert at mystery
plotting. Gillis wrote two scripts for our first season and
thereafter became "Columbo's" story editor for several years.

Because of the difficulty in finding writers, most of our scripts
were put together "in house." We would plot them, Bochco would rough
out a first draft, and then everyone would do the final polish. We'd
often sit in the office having daylong story sessions that would end
in near migraines for everyone in the room. Friends were pulled out
of the halls for reactions. A writer-director named Larry Cohen
dropped by to say hello and was immediately put to work on an idea
that had resisted all of our efforts. He quickly solved it, and
because he was that rarest of breeds, a writer who understood the
show, Universal employed him in future seasons just to come up with
"Columbo" story premises.

Our first scripts made their way to the network, and the response
was not effusive: NBC had major "conceptual concerns" with our
approach. How could we have made the terrible blunder of keeping our
leading man offstage until twenty minutes into the show? Didn't we
realize that Peter Falk was our star? The audience would expect to
see him at once, and here we were perversely delaying his
appearance. One of the executives called it, with considerable heat,
"the longest stage wait in television history."

There were other complaints. What about this business about an
unseen wife? And why a wife at all? Columbo should be free of any
marital encumbrances so that he could have romantic interludes on
occasion. Why hadn't we given him a traditional "family" of
regulars? At the very least he should have a young and appealing cop
as his assistant and confidante. And worst of all, the scripts were
talkative. They should be enlivened by frequent doses of adrenalin
in the form of "jeopardy."

There are only four responses a writer-producer can make to network
suggestions: He can ignore them, he can cave in, he can argue, or he
can threaten to quit. We opted for the last of these multiple
choices. We also pretended to a confidence we didn't feel in the
hope that our conviction, or at least the illusion of conviction,
would be persuasive in an industry plagued by uncertainty. And we
were lucky; we had time on our side. If "Columbo" was to meet its
air date, scripts had to be filmed as written. Any delay, caused by
either conceptual changes or a walkout by the creative personnel,
would throw the series hopelessly off schedule. NBC backed away and
grudgingly left us to our own devices.

And then there was Peter Falk. Stars of television series are not a
homogeneous group. Some of them, a Robert Young or an Arthur Hill,
are agreeable types who learn their lines, speak them well, and go
home. Others are temperamental and thrive on chaos. Falk was a breed
apart. He returned to television reluctantly after a happy
filmmaking experience with his friends John Cassavetes and Ben
Gazzara (Husbands), and I suspected that he had a deep psychological
resistance to the idea of doing a series. Then, too, he was
mistrustful. He barely knew us, and he was putting himself and his
career in our hands. It soon became evident that Falk's method of
protecting himself was to try to exercise control over the elements
of the show. A clash was inevitable.

Clash we did. But it was a strange kind of jockeying for power,
because Falk was as intelligent an actor as we had ever worked with,
and he was almost as familiar with the Columbo character as we were.
He was also extremely likable; even in the midst of an argument, we
couldn't help feeling a genuine affection for him. But in matters of
metabolism and methods of operation, we and Falk were very far
apart. Under the gun of the ever-present deadlines of series
television, we were inclined to make rapid decisions and move on to
the next crisis. Falk, on the other hand, tended to mull and ponder;
he didn't like to be rushed and wanted to keep his options open. In
an uncanny way he was very much like Columbo: clever, reflective,
and oblique. And so a Pirandellian game of cat and mouse was played
out in our office as well as in our scripts.

By early May we were all involved in intrigues worthy of John le
Carre. Falk insisted that someone he trusted be placed on our staff
to look out for his interests. As soon as this was done, we noticed
that he somehow mysteriously managed to acquire advance copies of
our scripts in outline and rough first drafts. These were not nearly
ready to be seen; quite naturally, he was dissatisfied with them and
tended to view with suspicion our promises that they would be
improved by rewriting. We countered his ploy by keeping all material
under lock and key. He made it a habit to drop by the editing rooms
to monitor the progress of various segments. We instructed our
editors to close their doors or to actually leave the building if
Falk approached. When he insisted on watching dailies, we wrote
scenes that had to be filmed away from the studio, scheduling them
so that he would be on location when dailies were shown.

All of this was a foolish waste of energy, but given the siege
mentality of series television, a sense of proportion is difficult
to maintain. Falk was insecure and trying to make a contribution.
Actors are usually powerless to control their fates in television,
and he was seeking any leverage he could find. But we were equally
insecure, and we resented his intrusion into areas that were
primarily our responsibility.

In a strange way his intransigence was useful. The studio insisted
that each of our segments had to be filmed in ten days, a woefully
inadequate schedule. But Falk refused to be hurried. In the middle
of shooting, he would engage the director in lengthy discussions of
story and character, and we would invariably drift into overtime.
Each episode took longer and longer to make—twelve days, thirteen
days, even fourteen days—until word got around that we were a
''problem'' show with a "difficult" star.

When studio executives tried to pressure Falk, he would explode into
diatribes about the Universal assembly line. He had not played
killers and gangsters for nothing; a Falk eruption was chilling to
behold. The executives would retreat to the safety of their offices;
they were up against a shrewd street fighter, and they didn't know
how to deal with him. All of which left us with more time to make a
better show. Falk knew exactly what he was doing, and for once his
interests and ours coincided.

Whatever our complaints about him, there was no denying that he
seemed born to play the role. When we created Columbo, we were
influenced by the bureaucratic Petrovitch in Crime and Punishment
and by G.K. Chesterton's marvelous little cleric, Father Brown. But
Falk added a childlike wonder all his own. He also added the
raincoat. We had given Columbo a wrinkled top coat in our play, but
during the filming of "Prescription: Murder," Falk dug out one of
his old raincoats from the back of a closet and never took it off.
He wore the same suit, shirt, tie, and shoes for the entire 10 year
run of the series, giving "Columbo" the somewhat dubious distinction
of having the lowest budget for male wardrobe in the history of the
medium, with the possible exception of Big Bird.

Falk cared deeply about the series, and our conflicts with him were
never personal. Some of the turmoil stemmed from the fact that he
had nothing to do during the long weeks of pre-production. Once the
series began filming, however, his energies were fully engaged and
there was quiet on the battlefield. Until he got it into his head
that he wanted to direct.

It is not unusual for the lead of a series to direct an occasional
segment. But it rarely happens in the first season. And few
television characters have as much to do in each show as Columbo.
Nevertheless, Falk was adamant. The studio took the position that he
had employed to act, not direct, and we were suddenly confronted
with the irresistible force and the immovable object – with us in
between.

Falk let it be known that he was not feeling well. He was ignored.
The illness apparently overpowered him he took to his bed. Our
schedule fell apart. Falk returned, he was briefly suspended, then
he was reinstated. Agents and lawyers descended on Universal's Black
Tower with notes from his doctors. Threats of litigation filled the
already furious air.

When in doubt, capitulate. At least that seemed to be Universal's
view. After weeks of resolute firmness, the studio, pressured by the
network, gave in to Falk's demands. We were instructed to find a
suitable script for him to direct. Falk was an instant hero to every
actor on every television series. He had, to coin a misshapen
metaphor, brought the Tower to its knees.

We had been expecting a collapse in the studio's position, and were
in a vengeful mood, so when we presented Falk with his script, it
was fashioned, by design, to drive even the most experienced
director out of his mind. The villain was an architect, and much of
the picture would have to be filmed at a construction site. We had
already picked the location, Century City, a massive new development
of steel and glass. Scenes would be shot in a gigantic hole in the
ground, swimming with dust, while an actual building was being
erected. The excavation had the look of a crater on the moon.

To Falk's credit, he prepared diligently. He consulted with other
directors and he spent his weekends at the construction site, lining
up shots. But the filming of the picture was a nightmare for him. He
picked up a cold and almost lost his voice. Concentration was
impossible because of the perpetual din of pneumatic drills and
rivet guns. And work on the building never stopped; nothing as
insignificant as a television crew was going to halt the march of
progress. Every time Falk would change his mind about a shot and try
to reshoot it, he would discover the set was no longer there --

a girder had gone up where his actors had stood moments before. We
took to visiting the location and smiling down at him from the top
of the hole. He'd shake his fist at us and plow on with the filming.

Interestingly, the picture that emerged was well directed. But
Falk's performance was off. The adrenaline he needed to direct
tended to interfere with his acting; he didn't calm himself
sufficiently as he went from one side of the camera to the other,
and so the usually low-key character of Columbo became, in this one
instance, almost manic. But the construction site gave us
fascinating production

values, and we were very pleased with the film. It was the most
expensive of the "Columbos," but the studio was too sheepish to
complain about costs. As of this writing, Falk has never directed
again.

September 12 approached, and Falk prepared to leave for New York and
the Neil Simon play. Ironically, during the final weeks, the three
of us found ourselves in frequent agreement on most of the decisions
affecting the show. We developed a grudging respect for his
instincts. And Falk, after attempting to write a script for the
series (he came up with an interesting first act and then ran
headlong into trouble), began to see that good material was not in
plentiful supply. It had been an education for all of us – stormy,
but not without value.

Seven "Columbos" were now scattered throughout the Universal lot in
various stages of completion, some in editing, some in dubbing. The
members our crew were absorbed by other shows. We had not even been
on the air and our work was almost finished. It was an odd feeling:
There would be no out-of-town tinkering, and our mistakes could not
be corrected. Ten and a half hours had been assembled in five
months, and now there was little for us to do but wait for our
national opening night.

The impact of a successful television series is a peculiar
phenomenon of popular culture. Best-selling novels, hit plays, and
even highly acclaimed motion pictures take many months to filter
into the consciousness of the public. But the fallout from a series,
or a miniseries such as "Shogun," can be instantaneous.

"Columbo" was an immediate popular and critical success, quickly
establishing itself as the hit of the new season, and within weeks
the character, the raincoat, and even some of the show's catch
phrases were popping up in newspapers and magazines across the
country. Peter Falk imitations were impossible to avoid on variety
programs and in nightclubs, and stoop-shouldered and squinty-eyed
ten-year-olds drove their parents close to the brink with dialogue
from the various episodes. More recently, a Jaws or a Star Wars
would have the same effect, but this was in the early seventies,
long before media hype became the art form of the decade.

The series began its run among the ten most-watched television
programs of the week, and it stayed in that position for years,
frequently moving into the number-one slot. The inevitable "Columbo"
game was marketed, and "Columbo" books, in one of the first of the
now-prevalent publishing tie-ins, made their appearance on the
nation's paperback racks. Falk, backstage in The Prisoner of Second
Avenue, complained that no one visited his dressing room to discuss
the play; all they wanted to talk about was Lieutenant Columbo.

We were, of course, delighted. We gave interviews praising Falk. He
gave interviews praising us. He was on the cover of Time, which
proclaimed "The Year of the TV Cop" and said "Columbo" was "the most
influential, probably the best, and certainly the most endearing cop
series on TV." The critical community took notice not only of the
show, but of the scripts. Cecil Smith, the television columnist,
spoke of "the brightest dialogue and most intricate plots around."
And when the television academy released its nominations for the
Emmy, every single writer in the Best Writing Achievement in Drama
category was the author of a "Columbo" script. On the night of the
awards ceremony, Falk won an Emmy, as did we, and as did Ed Abroms
for Best Editing.

The "NBC Mystery Movie," including "Columbo," received a quick
renewal, but we decided not to stay with it for a second season. We
wanted to do another motion picture for television, and we needed a
respite from the demands of the series form. The studio wasn't happy
with our decision, but we pointed out that the style of the show was
now well known and scripts wouldn't be quite as hard to come by. We
also promised to contribute some stories for the second batch of six
or seven episodes.

As the summer before the second season approached, NBC reasoned that
if "Columbo" was a hit at ninety minutes, it would be even more
successful if the episodes were inflated to two hours. Universal,
mindful of the excessive cost of the series, quickly agreed. Another
thirty minutes would bring more money from NBC, and some of the
overages could be absorbed.

Economically, it was a good idea. Creatively, it was a disaster.
Scripts were padded. Scenes were filmed and inserted to bring the
program up to length. Over the next few seasons, there were more and
more two-hour "Columbos." This was also true of the other shows on
"The Mystery Movie," but "McCloud" and "McMillan and Wife" had
looser formats and could more easily incorporate the added time.
"Columbo" remained a hit, but we came to feel that very few of the
segments could justify the added length.

Novelty and style are valuable aspects of any creative enterprise,
but it's almost axiomatic that they will wear out their welcome over
time. One cannot read successive doses of Hemingway without the
eventual feeling that enough is enough. Conversely, the works of
less stylistic writers will not be as irritating, because they are
not as distinctive; in the McLuhanesque sense, they are "cool" as
opposed to "hot."

In television terms, "Dragnet" is an example of this effect. What
was originally a fresh and inventive style of storytelling became,
through endless repetition, virtual self-parody. "Columbo" had the
same problem. The very qualities that made it interesting eventually
gave it a feeling of predictability. And the two-hour shows only
emphasized this weakness. In a way it had no business being a
series; it wasn't conceived for longevity.

There are theories, however, that television audiences like
repetition. They certainly liked "Columbo," and they stayed with it
long after it had passed the point of diminishing returns.
Fortunately, in Peter Falk the show had a star of great staying
power. In our absence he gradually took over full control. Producers
came and went -- six more followed us over the years -- but Falk was
the constant, and in many ways this was beneficial. He fought for
better scripts, publicized the series as often as he could, and
deepened his performance. In our opinion he wasn't ruthless enough
in the editing room -- he allowed Columbo to linger far too long and
too cloyingly on the screen -- but the continuing success of the
series was largely due to his efforts.

"Columbo" was distributed around the world. It even managed to
supplant televised baseball as a national obsession of the Japanese.
And its popularity in Rumania was such that the State government
asked Falk to make a brief speech explaining to the Rumanians – who
were apparently on the verge of riot -- that more "Columbos" would
be forthcoming.

It also spawned a host of imitations -- so-called character cops.
The first was Barnaby Jones, and then Cannon. A year or so later
Kojak made his debut, sucking on a lollipop instead of a cigar. If
Columbo was a shabby cop in elegant surroundings, Kojak was just the
opposite: an elegant cop in shabby surroundings, with macho Greek
bravado in place of Columbo's rumpled humanity. Finally, there
Baretta, and Robert Blake began to out-Falk Falk, replacing him as
the nemesis of the Black Tower.

Falk moved on to a motion picture career. "Columbo" had been a help
and a hindrance to him -- it gave him wide recognition, but it
threatened to identify him permanently with just one role. The last
time we met him, he had remarried and was uncharacteristically
mellow. We told him we missed working with him. He may have been a
monster, but he was our monster, and we had a certain masochistic
nostalgia for the Sturm und Drang of that first season.

We recalled a meeting with him after the series had established
itself as a hit. He had just returned from New York, and we informed
him that we were leaving the show. He was genuinely distressed and
urged us to stay. Surprised, we reminded him that the three of us
were in constant conflict. We had kept him away from dailies, we had
hidden scripts, we had even ordered the editors to lock their doors
to him. Why on earth would he want us to continue on for the second
season? Falk smiled. "Because now," he said, "I trust you."

Website copyright 2015 by William Link.
Photo of William Link and Peter Falk by Douglas Kirkland
Book cover illustration by Al Hirschfeld. Copyright Al Hirschfeld.
Hirschfeld exclusive representative is
Margo Feiden Galleries, Ltd., New York
Website by Dovetail Studio.